Trading history for the future

DreamWorks PicturesToo much action?: Ben Affleck does more running than thinking in Paycheck.

Hollywood owes a considerable debt to the fertile
genius of the late Philip K. Dick, the prolific science fiction writer whose
work has inspired a variety of highly imaginative and highly successful movies:
Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report,
and now, Paycheck. Unlike many of his
colleagues, Dick concentrated on subjects and situations transcending the usual
material of his trade --- robots, space ships, the future, etc. --- choosing
instead to deal with the intellectual, emotional, even ethical possibilities in
those subjects. The movies based on his work follow the novels and stories in
considering the linkage of memory with identity, and their interaction with the
paradoxes of time in the post-Einsteinian universe.

Based
on a long short story of the same title, and apparently set in some unspecified
near future, Paycheck explores some
of the author's characteristic interests. Ben Affleck plays Michael Jennings,
who works as a "reverse engineer," a technical whiz who figures out how some
advanced bit of technology works, then reconfigures it as something new and
different, working backwards from some completed machinery in a kind of
inspired pirating. To keep his work entirely secret, his boss and friend, Jimmy
Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart), erases Jennings' memory of exactly how he
accomplished his tasks, so he must readjust himself to the minor inconvenience
(considering his salary) of occasional brief gaps in his knowledge of the
immediate past.

When
Rethrick asks him to take on a big, top secret project that will require him to
work and forget for three whole years for an immense sum of money, Jennings
agrees. When he emerges into the present, expecting a paycheck for some 90
million dollars, however, he discovers that at some point in that period, he
signed a document exchanging the money for an envelope filled with
miscellaneous, more or less worthless, objects. Jennings realizes that he must
learn the meaning and purpose of the objects --- a bus pass, a magnifying
glass, a couple of keys, a wristwatch, sunglasses, an uncompleted crossword puzzle,
etc. --- in order to learn why he traded them for a fortune, a mystery that
also leads him toward recapturing his memory.

The
objects explain themselves, so to speak, as the movie's plot occasions their
use. In the timeless manner of the thriller, while he attempts to figure out
the meaning of the items and the reasons for his swap, Jennings also finds
himself the quarry of two separate groups of pursuers, which provides all the
usual action sequences to be expected in a John Woo film. While a team of FBI
agents attempts to find out just what he did for those missing three years, a
competing group of assassins merely want to kill him.

As
Jennings, assisted by Rachel Porter (Uma Thurman), the young woman he fell in
love with during the lost years (and of course forgot), eludes the two teams of
hunters, he finds that each of the items in the envelope helps him to escape
one or another danger. He also comes to learn that he consciously chose those
odd objects, which he naturally forgot, precisely in order to deal with the
situations he now encounters. Finally, he discovers that he had worked on some
sort of super laser telescope that apparently allowed its user to see around
the whole universe and thus to see the future. Instead of a reverse engineer,
he became something like a seer.

Just
as the picture presents that tantalizing notion --- presumably justifiable at
some level of physics --- it muddies the whole business with typically Wooesque
reliance on chases, shootouts, and explosions. Jennings himself raises the
question of what knowing the future may mean, whether epistemology can at some
point equate with destiny, so that prior knowledge creates later behavior, but
drops it after a few bemused mumbles.

Whatever
its debt to Philip K. Dick, Paycheck
is undeniably a John Woo movie. The film brushes aside its feeble attempts at
intellectual inquiry and settles for a climax in an extended gunfight in the
high-tech headquarters of the bad guy, who is of course Jennings' "friend"
Rethrick. The finale is complete with the usual hundreds of bullets, punctured
machinery, shattered glass, and high dives off great heights.

The
ingenious and fascinating premise, alas, tends to fade into the background
along with all the gun smoke and hissing steam. All the action also tends to
overwhelm the personalities of the principals, such as they are, with the
central character probably suffering the most. Affleck's square, handsome,
absolutely expressionless face and his clotted diction --- the words seem to
fight their way out of his clenched jaws --- hardly serve to reflect much
credibility anyway, which may suit the director's needs perfectly. With an
opportunity to make something intelligent and significant from the story, Woo
settles for chases, shootouts, and Ben Affleck. The author deserved more.